“Governments make decisions about lives like mine”

HIV and trans activist Erika Castellanos spoke on behalf of the community at the opening press conference of the International AIDS Conference. We are publishing her speech in full.

„It is always impossible to speak after Erika,“ a fellow panelist remarked recently at an event hosted by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in New York City, reflecting on the powerful and deeply moving words of the speaker before her. On 27 July 2026, Erika Castellanos took the stage at the opening press conference of the International AIDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro, representing the community perspective. Once again, she found words that were both compelling and unforgettable.

Below, we publish the full remarks of the HIV and trans activist and Executive Director of GATE (Global Action for Trans Equality). Castellanos is from Belize, a country on the eastern coast of Central America.

I am the Executive Director of GATE. I am from Belize. I am 50 years old. And just that is a success in my life and in the story of many trans people.

I’m speaking first as a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife, a trans woman who has lived with HIV since 1995.

I have lived through more than 30 years of promises, breakthroughs and funerals. I have watched medicines transform HIV from a death sentence into a manageable health condition. But I have also watched people die while those medicines existed. I have watched many of my friends die while those medicines existed.

Science did not fail my friends. Science did not fail those people. Politics did.

Survival is determined by a healthcare system recognizing our humanity, a government considering our lives worth protecting, and a world that is willing to pay the cost of keeping us alive.

I know what it means to enter systems that were never designed with people like me in mind. Will my name be respected? Will my body be judged? Will I be humiliated? Will I be safe? Will I receive care at all?

Today, we are told that funding for the global HIV response has “plunged” by 25% in one year. But funding did not fall by itself. This was not an earthquake or a natural disaster. The funding was cut.

The United States made a political decision to withdraw support. Other wealthy donor governments made political decisions not to step forward. These decisions have consequences. A clinic closing, an outreach worker losing their job, and life-saving medicine becoming unavailable.

By telling communities to be resilient, what is really being asked is that we survive abandonment. When funding disappears, services for trans people, sex workers, gay and bisexual men, people who use drugs, migrants and other criminalized communities and women and young girls are treated as expendable.

Human rights are fundamental to the infrastructure of the HIV response.

I am alive today because of science, activism and community. People like me survived because communities organized, because we organized care for one another, challenged governments and refused to disappear. I am here today because the IAS has committed to bringing science closer to everyone, because UNAIDS continues to provide the global political leadership that is required, and because funders like the Global Fund gave me the opportunity to stay alive and make a difference.

So, I say this directly:

Fund this response like lives depend on it – because they do. People living with HIV are not a line item in a report. We are the ones holding this response together while decisions are made far from their consequences. It is time to change that.

Let us be in the room when the decisions are made, not informed of them afterward. And if governments choose not to act, they should at least have the courage to call that choice what it is: a decision about whose lives they think are expendable.

Lives like my one.

Thank you.